[In the following review of Richard III directed by Michael Grandage in 2002, Brown analyzes Kenneth Branagh's Richard, finding his performance intelligent and complex. The critic concludes, however, that Branagh's characterization contributed to “a very good production, rather than a great one.”]

Michael Grandage's production of Richard III at the Sheffield Crucible is built around Kenneth Branagh. There are few “concepts” and the only major one, as we shall see, relates to Branagh's characterization. The costumes are non-specific medieval-modern hybrid, tunics and greatcoats with the young princes in trainers. The set, by Christopher Oram, a bare, grey stone floor on the thrust stage with a backdrop of pillars, is similarly generic and unobtrusive. The characters move swiftly across the open playing space, scenes almost overlapping. Tim Mitchell's grand schematic lighting, with banks of spotlights carving up the stage, does most of the work of differentiating spaces and keeps the action moving. The company are variable, though Danny Webb makes a fine, weaselly Buckingham, and Barbara Jefford delivers Queen Margaret's vengeful curses with real stature. Branagh, in his first proper stage appearance since his acclaimed 1992 Hamlet for Richard Eyre, is not a selfish actor; but there is never any doubt of where the focus lies. Everything depends on him.

The play opens with Richard crucified. Branagh, wearing only underpants, is wheeled on, strapped into a steel frame, his arms outstretched, his head held by bolts in a vicious metal ring—his crown of thorns. He begins his soliloquy, reciting emptily, lying almost horizontal. Then, as he reveals his true intentions, he is tipped forward onto the stage. Without the frame to straighten his body, Richard hunches forward crouched on the cold grey floor. His withered left arm hangs useless, his right leg is jammed out in front of him and he must struggle alone into his clothes. But the hermit crab is just moving from shell to shell. His clothes will train him again, with callipers down one trouser leg and a tightly strapped casing around his torso. Once dressed, he appears almost without disability, moves about the stage with great speed and only a slight limp, his useless arm tucked neatly into his tunic. He is handsome (we can imagine him courting an “amorous looking-glass”) and he may be “curtailed of this fair proportion”, but only privately so.

This startling opening image, performed with such force that it makes you wince, gives the play a defining motif and a ballast of repressed pain in what is a very comic production. Branagh is following on from his smiling, chuckling Iago in Oliver Parker's 1995 film of Othello and his brisk Reinhard Heydrich, architect of the Final Solution, in the recent television drama, Conspiracy—performances which begin to answer the question, how does an actor, known for his mild good looks, physical grace and decency, play evil? The answer is a performance of surfaces.

The most important is the one he shows to us, full of bonhomie and confidence, which plays on his image as an actor. Even as he emerges from the frame (“But I, that am not shaped for sportive tricks / …”), his tone is conversational and frank (this is a man, after all, quite exposed to us), save for a savage bellow on the last word of “And descant on mine own deformity”. He strolls along the perimeter of the Crucible's big thrust stage, working the audience, asking us “What?”, daring us to censure him. This knowing irony runs through almost every moment, at least until Richard begins to lose control of events in the second half of the play. It is an immediately attractive stance, friendly even, based on the certainty of, rather than a demand for, our involvement.

To the other characters on stage, he is the consummate actor, switching styles from moment to moment: jovial, sharp, wheedling, forceful and mocking. In the first wooing scene (Act One, Scene Two), he actually straddles Anne on the ground, forcing her to kiss him. Instructing the two murderers to kill Clarence, he suddenly hits them for no reason. His delivery of Shakespeare's verse is, as ever, dazzlingly fluent, fresh and irreverent. When Derby says that Richmond is on his way to claim the crown, Richard's dry riposte, “Is the chair empty?”, delivered very slowly, as if to an idiot child, gets a big laugh. His note of wounded sincerity (in Act One, Scene Three and elsewhere) and his protestations of unwillingness to be king (in Act Three, Scene Seven) are often hilarious. There is more than a touch of pantomime. After he has appeared before the citizenry with his two fake bishops, he chucks the bible to one of them. Before the interval, he turns back to look at the audience and enjoy one last smirk of complicity. This Richard III has been the fastest-selling show in the Crucible's thirty-year history, mostly, one imagines, on the back of Branagh's popularity. “Do you like me now?” he seems to be asking.

Part of the reason why this is a very good production, rather than a great one, is that our answer may be, a little too easily, “Yes”. Since 1945, Richard III has lived under two shadows: the defining memory of Laurence Olivier's production of that year, later made into his 1955 film, and the sense that, after Hitler et al, Shakespeare's ironical tragedy had become a great deal blacker and more contemporary. Yet here in Sheffield, the play seems to have regained a great deal of its lightness. Morally and emotionally, Richard's crimes do not register so strongly. There is nothing of the political and historical specificity of, for example, Richard Eyre's 1991 production, with Ian McKellen as Richard, set in a nightmarish alternative history of the fascist aristocracy—Oswald Mosley, Diana and Unity Mitford, even Edward VIII—that Britain never quite had. There is no suggestion of the symbolic force of Richard's killings (as in Sam Mendes's 1992 production with Simon Russell Beale), and no attempt to bring more of them on stage. Richard's victims are not particularly sympathetic either: the court is presented as a place of rivalries and Realpolitik, and even the two princes are brats who, albeit by accident, inflict terrible pain on Richard. Infanticide doesn't seem so bad. Part of the problem is that, because Branagh's performance so dominates and energizes the whole production, his victims seem quite diminished. Too much of the horror gets lost in the vaudevillean tone.

So, how evil is Branagh's Richard? He has moments of genuinely frightening violence and his sangfroid is itself chilling. But he doesn't have the touch of the demonic that you get from Olivier or McKellen or Al Pacino in his 1996 movie Looking for Richard. One hesitates to say that Branagh needs to show us more. His excellence as a television and film actor is based on his ability, not universal among theatre actors, to do almost nothing. Evil is, after all, the name we give to a kind of silence, a gap in motive—as Shakespeare himself recognized in the figures of Iago and Aaron. Both of those characters, like Richard, can trace their ancestry well outside ordinary psychological motivation to the symbolic figures of Vice and Machiavell. It may also be the case that, like Steven Pimlott's RSC Hamlet (2001) and the Almeida's recent King Lear, Branagh's Richard is an attempt to think through Shakespeare's dynastic politics for an age of spin and appearances—smile politics.

Yet there is still something lacking. Metaphorically speaking, Richard's deformity is too well braced; it is difficult to understand how a character with such stores of ease can also be so driven or full of self-hatred. The different levels of Branagh's performance need to seep more into each other. The very suddenness of his transitions (in all their virtuosity) suggests a characterization that, deep down, does not fully cohere.

Branagh does begin to develop this kind of complexity. As already mentioned, after Richard greets the two princes, there is a deeply uncomfortable sequence in which they knock him to the ground and play over him, pulling off his brace and clambering onto his back. In McKellen's film Richard, something similar happens, but there it is played for fear—of Richard's fury. Branagh's roar of pain is pitiable as well as frightening, and the whole episode illuminates, like a flash of lightning, a history of degradation and anger. As many productions have emphasized, almost as soon as Richard has got the crown, things start to go wrong for him. He sprawls uncomfortably on the throne, his rigid leg thrust out in front of him. A note of fear creeps more often into Branagh's performance and his personae begin to blur.

The second wooing scene (Act Four, Scene Four), when he must try to persuade Queen Elizabeth that he should marry her daughter, having killed her two sons, is particularly powerful. What begins as another piece of bravura sparring from Richard builds to a terrible crescendo as Elizabeth eliminates, one by one, the things by which Richard may swear—himself, the world, his father's death, God—until Richard, by now sprawled on the floor, cries that he will swear by “The time to come”. He means the future of the kingdom (the end that justifies the means), but the agony of Branagh's delivery suggests a much deeper need to believe in the future, a need related to his own private project to remake his body and escape his birth, “Deformed, unfinished, sent before my time / Into this breathing world, scarce half made up”. Like a shark, Richard must always be moving forward, away from what he is and what he has done. When she gives in and leaves, Richard's typically dismissive volte face from sincerity to “Relenting fool, and shallow, changing woman” is funny, but no longer entirely convincing. He has revealed too much of himself. Later, when he wakes from his terrible nightmare before the battle of Bosworth Field, he collapses onto the floor like a pinched Caliban, his face twisted in fear and pain.

The final scenes of Richmond's invasion and the battle of Bosworth Field contain, surprisingly for Michael Grandage, a few lapses of directorial judgment. The ghosts of Richard's victims, gathering around his sleeping frame and then spinning it as he sleeps, look silly rather than frightening. The battle scenes, too, are a little under-powered. Richard's battle armour, a flayed torso of raw red musculature and an exposed spinal column, is an uneasy, isolated element of symbolic costume. Perhaps Grandage is struggling to fit Branagh's complicated, highly individual Richard into a larger structure.

What is most striking is how the production deepens the character through pathos and a sense of the wounded animal within. Suffering is its strongest note. Branagh's characterization is not crassly psychological—there is no sense of a nice, vulnerable Richard on the inside—but it has a modern understanding of trauma and interiority. Richard's death—encircled, outnumbered and then speared viciously—is pitiable; he has made the journey from one form of highly symbolic death (crucifixion) to another. If Branagh has still not quite escaped his own likeability, he has given us a remarkable, intelligent Richard. If he could find more of the Antichrist in his crucified King, it would be a great one.